The present invention pertains to a vehicle headliner and particularly to a structure for mounting the headliner to the roof of a vehicle.
Headliners have been attached to the roof of vehicles in a variety of manners. Some headliners are attached using screw or snap-in fasteners while others have employed adhesives. Hook and loop type fasteners such as VELCRO have also been recently employed. One difficulty with such fastening structures, including hook and loop fasteners, is that once attached the headliner locks into position and no longer can be shifted laterally thereby requiring that the alignment and attachment of the headliner to the vehicle roof be precise when it is initially made. This is difficult to achieve in an assemblyline environment.
A particular problem area for attaching a headliner to the roof of a vehicle has been in the area of a sunroof where relatively large rectangular openings for the sunroof are required The edge of such opening formed through the roof of a vehicle frequently has little supporting roof structure immediately adjacent the opening. It is difficult therefore to adequately support the edges of the correspondingly aligned opening in the headliner. While a variety of vehicle accessories such as grab handles, visors, overhead consoles and the like have been used to assist in mounting headliners to a vehicle, the area near the sunroof has posed a continuous problem in terms of providing a neat trim appearance to the edge of the headliner while holding it closely adjacent the vehicle sunroof opening.